{"id":28485,"date":"2012-01-30T10:42:46","date_gmt":"2012-01-30T14:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28485"},"modified":"2013-05-07T10:43:29","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T14:43:29","slug":"active-duty-phony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28485","title":{"rendered":"Active duty phony"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin sent us a link to a Stars & Stripes article about a Vietnam veteran serving in Afghanistan, the title was “Vietnam vet joins \u2018today\u2019s war\u2019<\/a>” and it tells the story of Staff Sergeant Larry Marquez who says he was sent to Cambodia in 1973 as a raw recruit of 17 years. He compares the environment in Cambodia to Afghanistan and difference between serving in a war now to the war he saw.<\/p>\n

I screen shot the article, in case it gets pulled down;<\/p>\n

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Well, SSG Marquez is a year younger than I am, he’s 55 and the article says he was in Cambodia in 1973, 39 years ago. that means he was in Cambodia when he was 16 years old, the year after combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, so the story began to sound a little odd. So I pulled up his AKO profile;<\/p>\n

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It shows his first assignment as beginning in 1974 and he was a 13-bravo cannon cocker in the Texas National Guard. He admits in the Stars & Stripes that he was an artilleryman while serving an entire year in Cambodia. So I’m wondering why the hell they needed a howitzer in a place we weren’t even supposed to have troops? Later on in the story, the journalist says he was an infantryman. WTF?<\/p>\n

Anyway, I was looking at his profile in AKO. The profile part is filled out by the individual, it’s not driven by Army information records. I noticed that Marquez wrote that he was a 19-Kilo “Armored Tank Commander” I suppose that’s as opposed to an Unarmored Tank Commander. The years of that assignment are 1976-1980, but that’s pretty amazing because a 19K is the Military Occupational Specialty of an M1 tanker<\/a>. The M1 tank wasn’t fielded until 1982. And I’m pretty sure they didn’t field the M1 in the TXNG more than two years before the active Army got one. And I’m sure he wouldn’t have forgotten that the MOS for an M48\/M60 crewmember was 19E<\/a>. So I wonder if he even tells himself the truth. <\/p>\n

So, anyway, the first thing I did was contact the author of the article with my concerns and he IMMEDIATELY attempted to contact Marquez and his unit to address my ruminations. And so I sat on this story for a few days until he got an answer back – which is what I hope someone would do for me if they found out I didn’t check all of my facts. However, after waiting for four days for an answer from S&S, today I get an email from Kuz telling me that the S&S has “no comment” to my inquiries about the results of their investigation, so screw them. I handed them this story and they can’t answer me…so much for my courtesy to them. So here is the article in all of it’s screenshot glory. I hope S&S chokes on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin sent us a link to a Stars & Stripes article about a Vietnam veteran serving … Active duty phony<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phony-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}